


Rewritten and Retraced

by altschmerzes



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s02e19 Stalker, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sharing Clothes, Sharing a Bed, Team as Family, Trauma, Two Shot, part one is nick and warrick in the immediate aftermath of the episode, part two is nick and grissom a week or so later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-21
Updated: 2019-10-08
Packaged: 2020-03-09 08:07:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18912949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: After his stalker is arrested and the case is closed, all Nick wants is to go home. Except, his home is an active crime scene, and he can't go back to it just yet. Fortunately, Warrick is there with an easy solution, and a promise - "You're not alone."Fast forward a week later, and it's his first night home in his own apartment since Nigel Crane killed a man inside it. He knows it's safe, that it's all over, but he can't get past the breathing he hears in the walls. Nick knows it's stupid, knows it's irrational, but still, when he calls, Grissom picks up the phone.(Two-shot. Part one: Warrick. Part two: Grissom.)





	1. Chapter 1

> _Like the petals in our pockets_ __  
> _May we remember who we are_ __  
> _Unconditionally cared for_ __  
> _By those who share our broken hearts_ __  
> _As gentle as feathers, snow piles high_ _  
> ___Our world gets rewritten and retraced every time  
>  \- Sleeping at Last, "Snow"

“Let’s get back to the lab.”

With her quietly spoken words, Catherine prompts their way out of the observation room. One by one, Nick’s teammates leave, until he’s alone, watching Nigel Crane muttering to himself, _I am one, and who am I?_ over and over like the words mean anything at all. Whatever it is he’s looking for, staring through the one way mirror watching the man who’d killed Jane Galloway and Morris Pearson, almost killed him, Nick doesn’t find it before it all becomes too much and he has to get out of there, away from Crane, as fast as possible.

However long he’d spent standing in there alone, trying to find some sense in any of this, Nick had been expecting the others to have dispersed by the time he left. This turns out not to be the case. The door swings shut behind him at the same time that Warrick gets up off a bench in the hallway, clearly having been waiting there for him. He approaches Nick with a hand hovering out a little, like he’s afraid Nick might keel over at any moment.

“Hey,” Warrick greets, hand still out like he’s ready to catch Nick if he has to. Nick wonders if he even knows he’s doing it, acknowledging the greeting with a tight smile.

For a second they just stand there in the hall, neither speaking, and really, what do you say after that? Nick certainly doesn’t know. There’s a thousand things in his head, hammering at the inside of his skull along with his concussion-induced headache, and none of them seem to be capable of making it down through his head and out of his mouth. Luckily for him, Warrick seems to figure out the mechanics of speech before he has to.

“Why don’t you come sit down for a minute,” Warrick says, which opens up an easy and painless line of conversation Nick can follow him down easily.

“Nah, I gotta head home,” he refutes. Even as he stands there, it’s all catching up to him, the last day. Getting thrown through a window and falling twenty feet onto a hedge, lack of sleep, grappling with his would-be killer, all within a span of twenty-four hours, is a recipe for a bone-deep, aching exhaustion that’s taking hold of his body now. Nick rolls his neck, trying to do literally anything to dissipate even a bit of this headache, but stops halfway through the motion when Warrick’s response brings him up short.

“You can’t go home, Nick.”

For several silent moments, Nick blinks at Warrick and attempts to figure out what he possibly could mean by that, before giving up and asking him directly, “ _What_?”

“Your house is an active scene, remember?” To Warrick’s credit, he speaks in a gentle, calm tone, but doesn’t beat around the bush, making his point directly and clearly. “And even when they get done processing, cleanup won’t be there for a couple of hours, minimum.”

“Oh.” Nick squeezes the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Right. Right.” Obviously he can’t go home. Not yet. He lowers his hand, breathing out heavily. “Sitting down is, uh. Yeah. I think I’m gonna sit down for a minute.”

Warrick holds out his arm, indicating the hallway, and Nick starts walking in that direction, feeling his friend fall into step beside him as he passes. As they walk down the hall, Warrick’s hand settles over his back, guiding him through the building with gentle, unobtrusive pressure. Another day he may have shrugged it off, been affronted by the implication that he’s incapable of walking down a hallway under his own power but today that hand represents both a fair point - he might _not_ be able to walk down this hallway under his own power - and a comforting presence.

Once in the breakroom, Warrick gives Nick a barely-there push towards the couch, walking over to get a glass of water and talking as he goes. He tells Nick to ‘hang tight’, says something about talking to Catherine and Sara, and before he’s made it a full sentence Nick has tuned him out. It’s not something he does on purpose, just a product of the way his mind keeps drifting. Warrick’s voice is a reassuring rumble, familiar and steady, though Nick isn’t tracking anything he’s actually saying. The room feels fuzzy and distant, like he’s watching himself sit on this couch from somewhere far away. Only when he realizes Warrick is standing there looking at him expectantly, the way you look at someone just after you’ve asked them a question you need an actual answer to, does Nick come to the conclusion he probably should’ve tuned back in before now.

“Hm?” he hums, prompting Warrick to repeat what he’d said.

“Anybody we need to call?” Warrick’s question is quiet and pitched obviously, deliberately, artificially into casual. It mirrors the way he stands, arms folded over his chest and face too neutral. “Your parents, or somebody?”

Before he’s so much as finished the question, Nick is shaking his head. “No, don’t. I love ‘em, but they’d freak, probably be on the next plane.”

Which is true, but it isn’t the whole story. His reasons for not wanting his parents called aren’t purely altruistic. Sure, he wants to shield them from this, to avoid breaking their hearts the way he knows this news would, but it’s more than that. There’s selfishness in there too, because if Nick’s parents are called, and they get on the first plane out, he’s going to have to make himself be fine. He’s going to have to look them in the face and smile and laugh a little and reassure them that it’s okay, it was a close call but he’s fine. Really.

And right now? Nick is not fine. He’s not even remotely fine, and he needs some time to keep being ‘not fine’ until the world stops upending himself and he can stop hearing phantom breathing in the walls every time the room gets too quiet. So, no. It’s really for the best if Warrick doesn’t call his parents.

“Alright.” Warrick relents easily and without question; a small mercy. From the look on his face, it’s easy for Nick to assume he’s figured out the other reason why, but in another minuscule kindness he doesn’t push, just nods and resumes his exit from the break room.

Sitting there on the couch, alone with just his thoughts, Nick tries to piece together what to do next. Warrick is right. He can’t go home. His house is still an active scene, not to mention the man who’d died on his floor, the blood still staining the wood. Psychic or no, whatever he’d been, he’d been trying to help, he’d come there to help Nick, and for his trouble he’d gotten-

Lurching up out of his slump, he presses the back of his wrist over his mouth, nausea stabbing and wrenching at his gut. The break room’s trash can isn’t in his line of sight, so he grits his teeth, squeezes his eyes tight shut, and tries to breathe through it. The urge to throw up slowly fades, and Nick is left to fall once more against the back of the couch, wrist moving up to cover his eyes. Above his head, the lights glare garishly down, and Nick knows he can’t stay here. He has to go _somewhere_ , preferably somewhere with lights he can turn off, and he can’t go home. The question of where to go pulses in Nick’s brain in time with his mounting headache.

Logistics and planning is not in the cards at the moment, it would seem, and with a low groan, Nick leans his head back further against the couch. His hand returns to cover his eyes, blocking out as much of the persistent light as possible. Maybe he can just take a quick nap here, and when he wakes up, it’ll all make something approximating sense. Maybe not, too, but right now Nick is just tired and worn thin enough to try.

Sleep doesn’t really come except in drifts and eddies, shallow and fleeting. It’s the type of sleep that leaves a person more tired even than before, and he wakes feeling groggy and disoriented. For a few fuzzy moments, Nick looks around, trying to figure out what it was that finally pulled him completely into consciousness. His eyes eventually land on Warrick, leaning against the doorframe and looking mildly worried.

“Hey,” Nick mumbles, rubbing his eyes to clear them. He sits up slowly and tries not to wonder how many times Warrick may have said his name, trying to get his attention. “Hey, man.”

“You ready?”

The question doesn’t make any sense, and Nick’s confusion must show on his face as he blinks over. It takes a few moments before any response makes it out, and when it does, it’s a flat, bewildered, “What?”

“To go, Nick. Are you ready to go?” Warrick illustrates his point with a slow gesture over his shoulder with his thumb, still hovering half in, half out of the break room. “I’ve got my case stuff sorted with Catherine and Sara, so we can just take off.”

“Take off,” Nick repeats blankly. Warrick’s frown deepens and he steps into the room, gesturing again behind him.

“My place, y’know. Cause you can’t go back to yours.”

Understanding dawns, followed shortly by relief. Nick is too tired and in pain, glad to be rid of the convoluted question of ‘where am I supposed to go now,’ to put up even a farce of a protest, an objection of not wanting to cause Warrick any trouble. For right now, he will follow Warrick to his car without argument, leaning against the door as the engine starts and they pull out of the parking lot. Passing rows of employee cars reminds Nick of the basic fact that he’s actually quite lucky Warrick is taking him home - his car isn’t here anyway. What they don’t tell you about being the victim of a violent crime is that outside of the physical pain, the psychological trauma, the emotional consequences, is that it’s also complicated in a mundane way. How do you get home after? Where do you go when home isn’t an option?

Nick glances over at Warrick and feels a sharp twist of gratitude. He hadn’t had to actually think about either of those questions - someone else had answered them for him before they’d even crossed his mind.

The glass of the passenger’s side window is cold underneath Nick’s throbbing temple. He’s he’s rested his head against it in an attempt to alleviate his headache, which has been steadily mounting in intensity along with the rest of the aches gripping his body. There’s a Vicodin prescription in his jacket pocket that he’s supposed to have taken another dose of by now, and he’s being punished for not having done so, every injury he’s borne over the last day aching sharper and more violently with every passing minute.

Even the side of his neck is stinging again, and Nick touches it absently with the tips of his fingers. A piece of glass from the window had left a cut there; just a scratch, barely a pencil thin line of red. The doctor had called him a lucky man when she looked at it. Didn’t even need a Band-Aid. Nick hadn’t felt lucky. A piece of _glass_ had cut his _neck_. He’s seen what happens when pieces of glass come in contact with necks far too many times to feel lucky for having any personal experience in the subject. He leaves his fingers there, flattening out to cover the extent of the small, superficial laceration. It pulses under his hand like a threat. The thought swirls around and around, an agitated swarm of bees knocking around in his skull, until something abruptly stills them, halting the panic before it can overtake him.

Warrick’s right hand, taken momentarily off the steering wheel, squeezes his forearm again, lightly, eyes never leaving the road and voice making no comment, no observation. It stays there for just long enough that Nick’s heart stops racing - long enough for him to remember that he’s still alive and his carotid isn’t about to leave a splatter pattern he’s seen a thousand times before on the inside of the windshield - then returns to the wheel.

By the time they reach Warrick’s place, the pain is bad enough that Nick is having trouble focusing. He follows his friend inside slowly, moving with the jerking unsteadiness of a person whose entire body feels like one giant bruise. The kitchen counter was the first available surface to lean on that he’d spotted once inside, and Nick plants himself firmly next to it, drawer handle digging into his hip as he lets the cabinet next to him support his weight. Somewhere else, he can hear Warrick moving around, doing what, he couldn’t say, while he stands there and just loses time, drifting.

“Hey.”

The sound of Warrick’s voice next to him jolts Nick into the present, injuries angrily protesting the full-body flinch, leaving him to breathe through it with fingers digging sharply down against the countertop. Again, Warrick doesn’t draw attention to this obvious evidence of just how not-okay Nick is, instead giving it a moment and then holding out a pile of neatly folded fabric.

“I can have somebody grab some stuff from your place tomorrow,” he says while Nick unfolds the pile, shakes out a t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, “but for now you just need to get some sleep.”

There’s an implication there that this may go on for longer than a night, longer than it’ll take for cleanup to have Nick’s house released and habitable again, but for now, Nick ignores it. He’s too tired and strung out to argue, and Warrick seems to notice, watching him with narrow-eyed concern as he leaves the bathroom wearing clothes that don’t belong to him and feeling like his own skin is just a size too small.

“Nicky,” he says, getting up off the couch when Nick walks into the room, still doing that hovering thing that means Nick _must_ look bad, “when was the last time you took your meds?”

The silence is enough of an answer.

“I’ll get you a bottle of water, where are they, in your jacket pocket?”

Nick stands behind the couch, leaning against the back of it, eyes screwed shut against the light that once more feels assaultingly bright, listening to Warrick rattle around with his prescription, the fridge opening a second later. It takes him until Warrick returns, standing in front of him with a pair of white pills in his open palm, for Nick to gather his words together, ignore every instinct screaming at him to take them, and explain.

“They make me foggy,” he says. Presses his own hand down hard against his thigh, against the worn fabric of dark grey sweatpants just a little too long for him. He does this to stop it from shaking - shaking from pain or exhaustion or the memory of what happened the last time he dropped his guard, Nick doesn’t know. “Can’t, y’know. Can’t think straight. I have to... They make me foggy.”

Something twists in Warrick’s face and Nick is too tired and distracted to figure out what it means. He just keeps standing there, even as Warrick reaches out and grabs gently ahold of his forearm, pulling it up and putting the pills into Nick’s hand.

“So be foggy, then,” he says, like it’s that simple. “All you’ve gotta do now is sleep. Go ahead and be foggy, cause I’m not goin’ anywhere, and you’re gonna be fine. Nobody’s gonna get the drop on you.”

Moments tick by, while Nick thinks on the promise, on the pills in his hand, the water Warrick is still holding out to him. Trust or desperation, one of the two, causes him to toss the pills back, accepting the water. Once that’s taken care of, he goes to round the couch, to lie down and finally get some sleep, as instructed. Before he can make it, Warrick stops him with a hold on his elbow.

“I know your brain’s a little scrambled, but not enough that you can’t remember where my room is.”

This one, Nick _is_ going to argue him on.

“Come on,” he says, “I can’t put you out like that. You- You already…”

“It’s night time,” Warrick interrupts, eyebrows arched, though the expression is softened with a slight smile. “We work nights, and I’m not concussed _or_ medicated. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to sleep, but you need the rest, and you got tossed out a second story window today. You’re not sleeping on my couch.”

Nick nods, the movement slowed as if a video game in lag, head bobbing down then up then down and staying there, chin tucked to his chest like he’s lost the strength to raise it again. Maybe it’s because of this seeping away of the last vestiges of his energy, or because Warrick makes a pretty good point, but Nick agrees after that. He stands where he was stopped in the middle of the living room for a few moments longer, trying to organize his thoughts, until a gentle tug on his arm pulls him towards where he does indeed remember Warrick’s room to be.

Left alone, with the door half-ajar and light filtering in from where Warrick sits in the living room watching TV, Nick gets as comfortable as he can and tries to sleep. _Tries_ to sleep. He’d been so tired, at the lab, and in the car, and standing there next to the couch, but as soon as he’d laid down, aching head on a pillow, sleep had fled like a spooked rabbit. Every time he squeezes his eyes shut he sees a gun in his face and they snap open again, frantically combing through the heavy dark of Warrick’s room trying to pick out details. To make sure he’s alone, that he’s safe. That the shadow in the corner, a shade darker than the night around it, isn’t Nigel Crane or some other boogeyman.

It isn’t Crane. Not the first time Nick drifts into unconsciousness only to jerk awake with his heart pounding and cold adrenaline running frost-leaves down his shoulders and spine. Or the next time, when he lays there in a state of half-dreaming and a car backfires outside the building and suddenly he’s up and his body’s wired up all over again. It isn’t Crane the third time either, when Nick’s eyes, frenetically flicking around over and over, alight on the alarm clock on the other side of Warrick’s bed. Red numbers taunt him with the information that it’s only been six minutes that time, six minutes of what could loosely be described as sleep before the skin-and-nerve-stored memory of crashing through a window and twenty feet down shocks him back to now with a persistent _danger danger danger you’re in DANGER._

The air is still. The night is calm. Nick breathes as slowly and shallowly as he can, in and out, and tries to find that calm in himself too. He loosens- tries to loosen muscles tensed so hard they ache deeper than the bruising laid over them, and searches for something to focus on.

From the living room, there’s a sound. A voice. Warrick must have the TV on, Nick decides, and he concentrates on the voice, trying to make out what it’s saying. He sits up, slowly and gingerly, deep contusions punishing him for every movement, and leans back against the headboard, listening. The voice clears up, and Nick realizes the TV isn’t on at all, or if it is, it’s on mute. It’s Warrick talking, presumably on the phone.

“-could have done. Hang on, I think he’s up. Thanks, Grissom. Yeah. I’ll call you later.”

The voice in the living room goes silent, there’s a plastic click of a phone snapping shut, and then footsteps. Nick is too tired to scramble back into a horizontal position and pretend to still be asleep, so he stays put, sitting propped against the headboard. The exhaustion and shattered nerves must be evident on Nick’s face, thrown into relief by the lamp on the bedside table that Warrick wordlessly clicks on, because he cringes as he sits down.

“Can’t sleep, huh,” Warrick says, in a half-volume rumble of a voice.

It isn’t a question. It would be insulting to ask as a question, because anyone who looked at Nick for more than maybe a second and a half could see it. It’s obvious in the way his hands are plagued by periodic tremors that haven’t stopped since he turned his back on a ghost in an empty apartment building, and the way his eyes are half-lidded but still refuse to close, clocking the windows and the door, every entrance like someone’s about to come through the moment he looks away.

Nick swallows hard and nods. The action sends an aching pulse through his bruised, scratched throat. The headboard of the bed is hard and unforgiving against his back, and all of his weight is suddenly against it. He’s a puppet whose strings have all been cut, and he feels like he doesn’t have so much as the strength to hold his head up.

“Might help if you laid down,” comments Warrick, just a hint of teasing in his voice, though tempered and leagues from their usual ribbing. It’s something of a relief, that Warrick will still poke fun at him, will treat him with caution and care but not like he’s made of glass. He was nearly killed, sure, but he’s still _Nick,_ and it’s good news that Warrick is still Warrick too.

With movements slowed and made clunky by pain and a deep, sick tired, Nick eases back down the bed, stretching cautiously out until he’s returned to the same position he’s been in for more than an hour, trying and failing to sleep. If Nick were Dante, he thinks, with the aimless hysteria of the bottomed-out gas tank left behind when the adrenaline fades, this would be one of the levels of his Inferno. You’re so tired you think you might die, but no matter what, you just can’t _sleep._

Above him, perched now on the edge of the bed, making the mattress dip slightly to one side, Warrick arranges the blanket up to his shoulders, saying nothing more, just pulling at fabric until he’s satisfied. He sits there in the dark, sitting next to where Nick’s head rests on the pillow, and Nick tries to close his eyes, hoping that maybe if he can fall asleep in the time it takes Warrick to leave the room maybe he’ll be able to stay asleep. After all, if Warrick is still here, there’s no way Crane or anybody else with ill-will could be.

The mattress shifts, and Nick’s eyes snap open, his breath catching and choking in his chest.

“Easy,” Warrick says, barely audible. “Just getting comfortable, okay? I’m not goin’ anywhere.”

True to his word, he settles back down instead of getting up, and a moment later, Nick feels a hand come to rest on his head. He flinches unavoidably, holding his breath, but Warrick doesn’t move. The touch is a little stiff and slightly awkward, but it eases quickly to a steady, comforting presence. Nick focuses on the touch and keeps breathing. Just keeps breathing. Warrick is here. Crane isn’t here. He’s safe. _He’s safe._

As if sensing Nick’s thought process, Warrick speaks again, in that same quiet, non-judgmental voice. “It’s just you and me here, so you go ahead and stand down. I got the lookout so you just get some rest, huh?”

Nick breathes, slowly and evenly, and the hand on his head doesn’t move, a promise he doesn’t have to keep his strained eyes open to see.

When sleep finally comes, it comes in a blackout curtain, slamming down over Nick’s world and taking everything else away. By the time he surfaces from unconsciousness, the sun blazes bright and awake outside, striking into the room around the edges of the blinds drawn down over the windows. Warrick, wearing different clothes and reading a newspaper he hadn’t had when Nick fell asleep, is still there.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> .......sorry?? Anyways, it's done now, here's the second part of the two-shot I started forever ago, ft. Nick going home and Grissom getting the phone call I referenced in my Grave Danger fic, the reason I started this in the first place.  
> Enjoy, I hope!

They don’t let Nick come back to work for a week. Something about procedure and head injuries and the yet-unconcluded case open on him. In the time of his banishment from the lab, Nick doesn’t return home either. Cleanup is done by dusk the next day, rushed along by the watchful eye of Jim Brass, but nevertheless he stays put, neither he nor Warrick acknowledging or discussing his continued presence in a home that isn’t his. And while it’s easier, sleeping remains a challenge. 

By his short lived second attempt the second night, the reality of the situation makes itself inconveniently clear: he can’t sleep when Warrick isn’t home. 

The quiet that settles when the door closes behind Warrick as he leaves for work is full of whispers. Empty air prickles across Nick’s awareness, scratching in the walls snapping his eyes open every time he closes them. He stops trying, the few minutes of questionable rest not worth the price of jolting awake with his heart in his throat, his pulse pounding hard enough to be felt in his stitches. It takes longer to calm down from waking up than he ever spends asleep, and it doesn’t make sense to keep trying.

So he sits up at night, alone in Warrick’s living room, clicking through infomercials and trying not to think about how ridiculous this all is. Warrick gets home eventually and within minutes, Nick is out cold on the couch. The sound of someone moving around him, doing the dozen or so small tasks that form a person’s routine after work, it breaks the whispering silence into pieces. The sound itself cuts the silence and Warrick himself banishes the danger and Nick sleeps. Warrick works and Nick sleeps and for a while it’s a workable substitute for functioning.

The official word on when he’s allowed to go back to work comes home with Warrick one night.

“Grissom says you’re back on the end of next week,” he says, tossing his keys in the dish on the counter. 

Nick’s brain goes into an instant reaction of shock, of not being able to imagine what that’s going to look like. As if he’s been gone, living this weird imitation half-life for so long he can’t remember what his real life is. It takes him several moments of his mouth wordlessly hanging half-open, unable to muster words, to remember that Warrick is still standing there, waiting for some form of acknowledgement. 

“Oh,” he finally manages. “Oh, thanks. That’s. That’s good.”

“Yeah, it is,” Warrick agrees, with an odd look on his face, like there was a silent half of that conversation going on underneath the audible part that Nick hadn’t realized they were having. “Everyone’s excited to have you back, it’s been a little too quiet there without you.”

_It’s been too quiet here, too,_ Nick thinks, and smiles wordlessly. 

They make post-shift breakfast together that morning, and when they’re done, Nick takes the trash out to the dumpster in the alley next to Warrick’s building by himself. The early morning sun prickles out from behind light cloud cover, warming the back of his neck. His head doesn’t throb hard in complaint when he tilts it upwards, closing his eyes and soaking in the rays. He only manages to keep his eyes closed for maybe four seconds that feel to him like an eternity, before they snap open again and he does a quick, involuntary scan of the deserted street around him. It’s four seconds more than he’d have been able to manage earlier in the week, though, so he tries to hold onto the victory as he heads back inside.

Now that he’s supposed to be going back to work, Nick figures he should probably establish - for himself more than anyone else - that he’s capable of going home first. Warrick offers to stay with him, even just that first night, but Nick declines. He hesitates for a moment, instantly and instinctively wanting to say yes, but he says no in the end. Life has to move on at some point, and now is as good a time as ever. 

Warrick at least insists on driving him home - his car is still there, after all.

They walk inside together, and as they pass over the threshold, Nick stops breathing. For a moment, he doesn’t know what he’s going to see - blood on the floor, Morris Pearson’s body, a gun pointing in his face. What he sees is… his house. His hallway, his living room, his kitchen. Empty. Quiet. Safe.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay?” Warrick asks the question standing in the front doorway, keys in hand, hesitating before his foot was across the threshold of the porch. He’s already stayed far longer than a person dropping a friend off at home usually would, not making any sort of direct point about it, just continuing to make easy small-talk while Nick got re-settled, until hours had escaped them. Finally, though, there was no more pushing it off, and now he’s half turned away half turned inside, and there it is again, the word ‘yes’ on the verge of escaping from Nick’s throat.

It doesn’t make it out. He swallows it down and says ‘no’, and smiles like he means it. Warrick hesitates for another moment before pushing off the doorframe and walking back over. He grabs Nick into a quick, tight hug, and then he’s gone, disappeared out of sight down the walkway to where he’s parked on the street. Nick stays put, Warrick’s hug echoing around his shoulders like a ghost, but the kind that’s there to keep him safe rather than harm him. 

Most of the day goes alright. Nick walks from room to room on a loop, every so often, going over things like he can’t quite believe it’s all as it should be, and if he takes his eyes away, there will be blood stains and the barrel of a gun waiting for him when he turns back. On the flip side, when he doesn’t expect blood, he expects Warrick. They’d spent long enough effectively living together, Nick haunting his best friend’s place as that half-there version of himself that couldn’t sleep at night when Warrick wasn’t home, that he’s grown used to it. Every corner he rounds that Warrick is not on the other side of is an odd reminder that things are returning to how they should be, and ‘how they should be’ feels stranger than it has a right to.

Eventually, Nick feels like his resting heart rate has come down to something at least approximating healthy and calm, and he can’t really justify just wandering around his own home like he’s never been there before any longer, and he goes to bed. He lays there in the dark for a long time, staring at the ceiling and trying to coax his eyes into closing without sending him bolting upright with a once-more racing heart and seized stuttering breaths. When sleep comes, it does not come gently or easily. It comes sluggishly, like tar slowly consuming Nick’s body until it pulls him under.

When he wakes, there’s breathing in the walls, someone is _there,_ and there’s only one thing Nick can think to do. His cell phone is in his hand before he can process what’s going on, flipped open and a contact dialed. It rings, and rings, until a familiar voice answers, sleep-hazed and worried, identifying the man who’d picked it up.

“Grissom.”

* * *

 

The day Warrick sets foot back in the office after taking Nick home with him and staying for a while, refusing to leave him alone until he was absolutely needed back into work, Grissom waits in his office. He sits there and waits alone, doing paperwork, one eye on the half-open door, for the person he’s been expecting to make his appearance.

Sure enough, the door swings the rest of the way open, and then pushes shut again, drifting shut just barely not hard enough to fully latch, instead caught by and relying on the friction of door against door frame to hold it closed. Warrick walks inside slowly, eyes poorly focused somewhere over Grissom’s shoulder, and sits down in a chair across his desk. He doesn’t say anything, just sits there, breathing measured and deep, until he drops his head and buries it in his hands. 

Grissom rounds the desk and crouches down in front of the chair. From this distance, it’s clear that Warrick is shaking, tremors running through his back and causing tightly coiled ringlets of hair to shudder not six inches in front of Grissom’s face. He still doesn’t say anything, and Grissom doesn’t ask any questions, either. What would be the point? They both know what this is about. Instead, he reaches out carefully after a few moments, settling a warm, steady palm at the back of Warrick’s neck, as if saying silently, _I know, I know, I know._ The two of them remain there together, sitting and kneeling in the silence of Grissom’s office, broken only by the ticking of the clock on the wall, until the shaking stops.

They don’t talk about it, afterwards, the shaking itself, but the cause comes up almost immediately. It’s Nick. Nick, at Warrick’s place, alone, Nick who hadn’t been able to sleep that first night because something in his head kept telling him it wasn’t safe to close his eyes, not until Warrick sat beside him and covered them himself, promised he would keep watch. And he did. Keep watch. That night and the one after it and now he’s here, and Nick is alone, and Grissom can see how that’s eating at him.

“You’ve done everything you can do,” he says, and Warrick is already shaking his head before the sentence has made it halfway out.

“Everything I could do is not turn my back and let him get tossed out a window in the first place,” Warrick says, more of the world’s weight than is fair for him to shoulder shifting into place with every word that leaves his mouth. Or, probably more accurate, maybe it’s already been there, and he’s just letting Grissom see it, explaining why he can’t bring himself to put it down. “Everything I could do would be taking all the weird shit happening to him seriously - make _him_ take it seriously - before that man ended up standing in Nick’s living room with a gun in his face, Grissom.”

Warrick hadn’t been there when it happened, hadn’t seen even the immediate aftermath of the event itself, but neither had Grissom, and he still has a full technicolor view of what it must have looked like, the expression that must have been on Nick’s face, the gun pointed at him in a way a gun only points when the person pointing it intends it to go off. Grissom can see it, and he’d bet Warrick can too, every time he so much as blinks. 

“You didn’t do this,” is the best Grissom can come up with. He’s said it before, on the night Warrick took Nick home with him after they’d arrested Crane. “And there’s no way you could’ve known it was going to happen. We all assumed horses, Warrick, it wasn’t just you. In our line of work, we deal with so many zebras it’s easy to think we should’ve seen it coming, but nobody would’ve. It was a one in a million scenario.” He’d said that, too, that night, ‘one in a million scenario’, but he doesn’t think it had any more a calming impact then than it does now, which is not much at all.

Warrick called Grissom the first night Nick came home with him, and he calls again the night he takes Nick back to his own home. 

“I’m worried about him,” Warrick’s voice says from the speaker of Grissom’s phone. 

He’d been getting ready to go to sleep when he’d answered it, a back copy of the American Journal of Entomology laying open on the table in front of him as he wound down from the day. The phone was laying on the table, a quiet question of what crisis was going to shatter the still air of his living room hovering around it like it always does. Even when nothing is actively burning down, Grissom still smells phantom smoke, always at the edge of his awareness. Hazards of the job.

“Nick back home okay?” he asks, closing the Journal and looking out across the table at a window. 

“Yeah, he’s inside.” The words are said in a sigh that don’t make the accomplishment sound like it is one. “I feel like I should’ve stayed. He didn’t want me to, and I wasn’t gonna push it, but… I don’t know. Feels like I should’ve stayed.”

“It’s an important step,” Grissom says, like that’s going to make Warrick feel any better, make the person who appointed himself Nick’s guilt-ridden guardian angel for the last week plus feel absolved of having left him alone. It doesn’t. 

They talk for a few more minutes, about Nick, about the approaching firearms recertification test, about the new hire from day shift who’d be onboarding in the tech lab in a few weeks. It’s a meandering, half-hearted conversation that eventually peters out into silence, and then Grissom is left again, alone with the Journal of Entomology and his still phone. 

It stays still for another forty-five minutes, long enough for Grissom to have actually gone to bed, phone on his nightstand. It starts to buzz frantically, jolting Grissom out of the light sleep he’d drifted into, leaving him disoriented enough that it takes him several moments to figure out what’s going on and answer the phone. He snaps it open and holds it up to what he vaguely hopes is the vicinity of his ear, and mutters his own name in a sleep-hazed voice.

“Grissom.”

Almost immediately, the words on the other end, panicked and speaking fast, alert him to the identity of the person who’s called him at a time when everyone he knows would know he was supposed to be out cold.

“There’s someone here. I can hear him moving, there’s someone breathing in the walls, someone’s here.”

“Nick? Nick can you hear me?” Grissom has sat up by now, eyes wide and blinking into the dark of his room, tiny shocks of adrenaline beginning to run down his spine. “What’s going on?”

“He’s here, Grissom, it’s him, the walls, they’re- There’s someone here, I need-”

Though Nick’s words are still frantic and slurred with sleep to the point that he could almost be mistaken for drunk, Grissom begins to calm down. The adrenaline recedes as soon as it had arrived and in its place is an aching pain in his chest, dull and throbbing. Nick thinks Nigel Crane is in his house. Grissom knows he’s not - that he can’t be, he’s stuck in lock up somewhere and if he’d managed to somehow get out they’d have been called already and Brass would be on his way to Nick’s place before the call was even over - but that doesn’t matter. When a traumatized brain feels as if it’s under threat, logic doesn’t help. 

“I’m coming, Nicky,” he says, rather than trying to reassure the freaked out man on the other end of the phone that no one is there and no one is going to hurt him. “I’m leaving right now, and I’ll be there soon.”

The line goes dead, and Grissom wastes no time in getting up, throwing his coat on over his pajamas and shoving his feet into what he hopes are a matching set of shoes. The drive from his place to Nick’s isn’t very long but it feels like it takes ages, and what he sees when he gets there renews that fresh pain in his lungs. Nick is sitting out on the porch, arms folded over his chest and one leg bouncing, heel tapping over and over on the lower step. He stands when he sees Grissom pull up, and the look on his face is intensely embarrassed.

“Hi,” he says softly, when Grissom approaches. “Sorry, I…”

“You did exactly what you should’ve done,” Grissom says, cutting that thought off at the pass. In a choice between a world where Nick lays alone in the dark, terrified and frozen, racing pulse and hyperventilation driving shockwaves of panic through his body, and a world where Grissom is woken from sleep by a phone call from a frightened friend, even if nothing is materially wrong, he knows which one he would rather live in, and he’s glad it’s the one he does. “I’m glad you called.”

As the two of them head back into the house, Grissom takes the lead. He opens the door casually, looking to the left and right inside before walking all the way in, Nick following behind him. He proceeds through the rooms, opening closet doors and shining his flashlight into corners. Approaching the attic, the sound of a cleared throat stops him, and Grissom looks back. Nick is standing by the wall, leaning back against it and looking sheepish, sleeves pulled down over his hands and arms folded in an uncomfortable defensiveness. 

“You really…” He trails off, clears his throat again. “You really don’t have to do this. I know it was dumb, I know there’s no one here. You don’t have to… Y’know.” 

And he does know. You don’t have to check under the bed for monsters, Nick was about to say, and Grissom finds himself wondering, offhand and unprompted, if this is typical. If other childless men married to their jobs repeatedly catch themselves feeling this much like a parent. It’s a feeling he wouldn’t trade for the world, finds he covets that kind of trust jealously and fiercely, and he gives a firm shake of his head.

“Well, I’m going to, so you just sit tight while I finish, okay?” He says it brusquely, providing no room for protest or argument, and climbs up the short pull down ladder into the attic. There’s no one there, either. Nick doesn’t try and get him to stop any more after that, and that’s how he knows it really is helping, having a second pair of trusted eyes verify that things really are as they should be. There’s no one anywhere in the house aside from the two of them, and while he’d known this before he even got in his car to drive over, it makes Grissom feel better too, having it confirmed. 

It’s time for him to leave, no reason to stay any longer now that the danger, real or perceived, has been extinguished once and for all. Nick is hovering around, the air between them stilted and awkward, and Grissom feels like there’s something he should be doing, something he should be saying, to put this whole thing to rest. Nick won’t look him in the eye, and his jaw is set at the odd angle of a person swallowing down words they know won’t come out right, and Grissom is struck with a sudden memory.

It had been Holly Gribbs’ first day, and she’d gotten accidentally locked in the morgue with the bodies, and when she’d come out, she’d been frantic, panicked, insisting no matter how much she knew better that she’d heard them breathing. He hadn’t known what to do then either, and acted on the same instinct he lets take hold now, as he crosses the short distance between them and pulls Nick into his arms. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t promise things will be okay, doesn’t remind him that Nigel Crane is going to be away for a long, long time, if he ever gets out at all. Instead, he just holds on tightly for a moment, before pulling away and tapping Nick’s cheek gently.

“You have my number,” he says, and leaves out the front door, the house quiet and peaceful behind him. Nick does has his number, and as long as he knows to use it, Grissom really does believe that things will turn out, maybe not now, and maybe not soon, but someday, okay.


End file.
